There are plenty of books in which a literal monster is the protagonist, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster to Doctor Jekyll and beyond. More recently we have had John Wiswell’s delightfully twisted debut Someone You Can Build a Nest In. Molly O’Neill’s debut Greenteeth takes a similar premise but sets it in medieval England and ties the characters and action more firmly to established British folklore.
Jenny Greenteeth is a monster living in a lake next to a small English village. She is disturbed when a witch, called Temperance, is thrown into the lake bound in chains. Jenny saves Temperance’s life and the two quickly find that the reason that the village has turned on her is the influence of a new pastor who may well be the avatar of a much older evil. The two, accompanied by a goblin, travel to find the fairy court in a bid to find a way to rid the village of the malign influence and rescue Temperance’s husband and children.
Despite trying really hard, Greenteeth sometimes fails to engage. The characters, monstrous and otherwise, are a little flat to the point where the falling out between Jenny and Temperance feels contrived just to create some drama. And the plot, essentially a series of mini-quests, have a video-game feel. The way the book is narrated it is hard to conceive of Jenny as a monster at all, unlike the protagonist of the Wisell book. And Jenny’s arc, such as it is, boils down to: monster comes to terms with her life and learns to like humans.
Where Greenteeth shines is in the way O’Neill draws heavily on the folklore of the British Isles. Besides witches and goblins and lake monsters there are the fae, unicorns, and giants. But the tale also connects back to legends of King Arthur, with Merlin getting a name-drop early in the piece. And the quest-based narrative is at least of a piece with this tradition, even if it also feels a little hackneyed. That said, the reveals through the climax of the book, based on tiny clues dropped through the narrative, are quite satisfying.
Greenteeth is a solid debut aimed squarely at lovers of traditional fantasy and traditional fantasy narratives. O’Neill has fun with familiar character types from what Ben Aaronovitch calls the demi-monde in a more medieval setting and links it all to some deeper mythology, and it will be interesting to see what she does next.
Greenteeth by Molly O'Nerill
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